The sun had just set on the West Coast on Jan. 7 when Jennifer Rogers’ phone pinged in Oklahoma.
What played on her screen was a 14-second video message: A dark, smoky sky. A friend speaking, his voice steady and sad, as he pointed toward the orange glow of the fast-encroaching Palisades fire.
“OK, Jenn, it’s in the park,” he said. “Without a doubt.”
The park — named after Rogers’ great-grandfather — was Will Rogers Historic State Park in Pacific Palisades. A two-story wooden ranch house, the last place the cowboy-humorist had called home, stood there.
After watching the video, Jennifer Rogers, who lives near her great-grandfather’s gravesite in Claremore, Okla., “just put my phone on silent and sat and cried.”
The fire destroyed Will Rogers’ century-old house, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. And it incinerated his white-and-green stable with its stately central rotunda.
Joe Field, a firefighter with the Los Angeles Fire Department’s Station 69, looks at the burned remains of Will Rogers’ historic ranch house.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
In the surrounding park — 186 wooded acres cut with ocean-view hiking and equestrian trails — more than 200 trees planted in the 1920s and 1930s at Rogers’ behest were so badly charred they soon will be removed, according to California State Parks officials.
Four months after the fire, a portion of the still-closed park is being used as a processing site for trees and shrubs removed from the fire zone, according to the state parks department. The site also is being used to pulverize concrete removed from burned properties, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
As for the twisted remains of Will Rogers’ 31-room ranch house: They had not yet been cleared as of Friday.
For Jennifer Rogers, the question she faces the most is the one that’s hardest to answer: What comes next?
It is hard to overstate the grip Will Rogers had on Americans in the early 20th century.
Rogers was the country’s first multimedia superstar: Nationally syndicated newspaper columnist. Book writer. Radio broadcaster. Hollywood’s highest-paid actor and the star of more than 70 movies.
Humorist Will Rogers laughs while sitting with his feet propped up on a straw table.
(George Rinhart / Getty Images)
The “Cherokee Kid,” as he was known, was born in 1879 in Indian Territory near modern-day Oologah, Okla.
With his country twang and aw-shucks mannerisms belying a keen intellect, he was the lasso-roping star of vaudeville and Broadway stage. And his wry political commentary is widely considered the precursor to the modern late-night TV monologue. [“All I know is just what I read in the papers,” he once quipped, “and that’s an alibi for my ignorance.”]
“He was born in the Old West, the dying days. And by the time he’s 21, it’s the 20th century, and everything is changing and he’s adapting like some kid jumping on the internet in the ‘80s or YouTube in the aughts,” said Larry Nemecek, board president of the nonprofit Will Rogers Ranch Foundation. “He became the king of all media while it was being invented.”
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In 1919, Hollywood — the up-and-coming center of the film industry — came calling.
Rogers, fresh off his first silent film, “Laughing Bill Hyde,” moved with his wife, Betty, and their four children to Southern California at the behest of movie producer Samuel Goldwyn. A few years later, the couple bought more than 200 undeveloped acres in the Santa Monica Mountains, in the nascent community of Pacific Palisades.
There, the family built what started as a six-room weekend cabin. It was added onto over the years until it became a 31-room, year-round residence.
In a 1927 letter to his architect, Rogers said he wanted the cream-colored house to be a simple, box-like structure, “very plan [sic] and ordinary” and with “a big wide porch.” It was built on a gentle slope. But, he wrote, he wanted some level ground in front of the porch “so we can ride our horses up and hitch ‘em right in front of the house.”
The house had a wagon-wheel chandelier and barnlike rafters — and a high ceiling that Rogers had raised while his wife was traveling abroad so he could practice roping indoors.
There were Navajo rugs; custom, Western-style Monterey couches and chairs; and hundreds of books, including signed first-editions by Theodore Roosevelt, Helen Keller and Harry Houdini. A stuffed roping calf given by a friend, artist Ed Borein, who had grown tired of Rogers lassoing him, stood in the living room.
The ranch, Betty wrote in her memoir after her husband’s death in a 1935 Alaska plane crash, “was the joy of his life.”
Shortly before her death in 1944, Betty deeded the ranch to the state.
On the morning of Jan. 7, Barbara Tejada joined fellow State Parks employees from across California at Malibu Creek State Park for a long-planned fire training session.
“We were all here, and then, of course, it was Santa Ana wind conditions,” said Tejada, a cultural resources program supervisor. “Everyone was on edge. We all had our fire gear. … We’ve all got basic fire training.”
Jennifer Rogers speaks with members of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s Pacific Palisades-based Station 69 in front of the burned remains of Will Rogers’ ranch house.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
Just after 10:30 a.m., attendees’ phones started pinging: A fire had started in the Palisades.
Tejada and a colleague grabbed boxes, tape, moving blankets and bubble wrap from the Malibu Creek facility. They took off for Will Rogers’ ranch house, slowly weaving around traffic gridlocked on Pacific Coast Highway.
Tejada said 10 State Parks employees — two of whom would lose their homes — worked on-site, packing. Maintenance and restoration staffers started sprinklers atop the buildings and on hillsides, she said.
For about two and a half hours, workers stuffed State Parks pickup trucks and personal vehicles with historic treasures.
“We have an emergency evacuation plan for Will Rogers with a list of priority items by time — if you have one hour, get these things; if you have two hours, get these,” Tejada said.
Thousands of rusty nails lie on the ground near the burned ranch house.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
But as the flames approached, she said, “people just started grabbing whatever was easily reachable.”
They saved paintings, pottery and Native American rugs. They got the typewriter Rogers used to compose his newspaper columns. Tejada carried out sculptures and paintings by Rogers’ friend, the artist Charles M. Russell.
The stuffed roping calf burned. So did all the furniture, the book collection, and a newly restored, hand-crank barrel piano.
Sometime around 5 p.m., Tejada said, they fled. Flames were visible in their rearview mirrors.
“We did the best we could do,” she said.
The next morning, the sprinklers — no match for the wind-driven fire — were still spraying.
Growing up, Jennifer Rogers knew little about her famous great-grandfather.
Will Rogers’ ranch house, shown in 2006 after a restoration.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
“We didn’t really talk much about Will Rogers. My family was very humble,” said Rogers, 59, who lived in New Mexico and Texas in her youth. When her late grandfather, Jim, spoke of him, “he always said, ‘When Dad would come home, he wasn’t Will Rogers; he was just Dad.”
Rogers did not visit the ranch until she was about 21. And in 1991, when her grandfather took her family to New York City for the debut of the musical “The Will Rogers Follies,” based on the humorist’s life, she “sat there on Broadway in disbelief.”
“I had no idea, the magnitude of Will Rogers,” she said. “I just said to my grandpa: ‘I want to learn more.’”
In 2006, as the state was finishing a $5-million restoration of the ranch house, Rogers co-founded the Will Rogers Ranch Foundation, to support the park.
Rogers — who for two decades ran a Bakersfield-based almond company called My Husband’s Nuts — became the public face of her famous family.
The interior of the ranch house in 2006, after an extensive restoration. Thousands of books, rugs, ropes and other artifacts had been in storage while workers installed new humidity–control measures and repaired water damage.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
Jennifer Rogers looks at the charred page of a book outside her great-grandfather’s burned ranch house.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
After the fire, she received phone calls and emails from Will Rogers fans around the world — an outpouring of grief she never expected. In Claremore, Okla., a man dropped off a huge bouquet of flowers to the Will Rogers Memorial Museum, she said, “because he just felt so sad and didn’t know what to do.”
“I realized he’s still alive. He’s still alive,” Rogers said of her great-grandfather.
Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, which has more than 28,000 citizens in California, said that “more than a century after his heyday, we’re still talking about him because the things he said are timeless.”
Rogers joked that “my ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but they met the boat.” He never shied away from his Cherokee heritage at a time when many did not talk about it out of fear of persecution, Hoskin said.
“The loss of the ranch is a tragedy, because Will Rogers is a singular figure in Cherokee history,” he said.
Nemecek, a docent at the ranch for more than two decades, said it was challenging to keep Rogers’ memory alive even when the house was still standing.
For years, people would come for tours and declare, “I love Will Rogers and his horse, Trigger!” — a mixed-up reference to the actor and rodeo star Roy Rogers. In time, Roy was largely forgotten too.
Nemecek, 66, loved showing off Rogers’ typewriter. [“What’s a typewriter?” one child whispered to his mother.] And he would lead kids to the dining room table, telling them to peek underneath. Rogers’ petrified gum was still stuck to the wood.
Rogers, he would explain, was always gnawing on a wad of gum. Even during one of his most famous speeches, a nationwide broadcast dubbed “Bacon, Beans and Limousines” recorded at the downtown L.A. studios of the radio station KFI in 1931, in the midst of the Great Depression.
Then-President Herbert Hoover had invited him to speak. Wearing a cowboy hat and bow tie, Rogers chews his gum. He jokes. He’s amiable but outraged, delivering a blistering critique of the country’s high unemployment rate, bread lines and uneven wealth distribution.
“It wasn’t the working class that brought this condition on at all,” he declared. “It was the big boys themselves who thought that this financial drunk we were going through was going to last forever. … There’s as much money in the country as there ever was. Only fewer people have it.”
Amid the state budget crisis in 2008, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger — who, along with celebrities such as Billy Crystal and Tom Cruise, once boarded his horses at the park — threatened to close Will Rogers State Historic Park and dozens of other money-losing state parks with flagging visitation. The governor eventually backed away from the proposal.
After working to boost interest in the ranch, Nemecek had been thrilled to learn that every week of the current school semester was booked with school field trips for the first time in years. And plans for centennial celebrations were just getting underway.
Nemecek, an actor, author and native Oklahoman, said “the ironic thing is that so many people now are reawakened to Will because of the tragedy.”
It remains unclear when Will Rogers State Historic Park will reopen.
A portion of Will Rogers State Historic Park is being used for the processing of vegetative waste and concrete removed from the Palisades fire burn zone, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
(Christopher Rosario / U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)
Beginning April 14, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began using just over 3 acres at Sarah’s Point, an area south of Will Rogers’ polo field, to process vegetative debris and concrete from the burn zone. The work is expected to take three to four months, according to the Army Corps.
“The concrete that we are recycling is generally the foundation of a home,” Patrick Moes, a spokesman for the Army Corps, said in an email to The Times.
The concrete, he said, is washed at its original property before being brought to the park, where it is ground into tiny pieces while being sprayed with water to mitigate the spread of dust.
Concrete from the Palisades fire burn zone is crushed at Will Rogers State Historic Park.
(Christopher Rosario / U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)
Marty Greenstein, a State Parks spokesman, said in a statement to The Times that “this is not a waste disposal site — long-term storage is not occurring, nor is the site processing hazardous materials.”
Tejada said the removal of debris from Rogers’ house and barn and other structures is expected to be completed by early June.
In the park, roughly 400 trees, mostly non-native — and notoriously flammable — eucalyptuses, were considered part of the cultural historic landscape. The fire killed about 200, primarily around Inspiration Loop Trail, Tejada said.
“Will had directed them to be planted to line all the pastures and roads,” Tejada said. “The benefit was they grow tall and straight. Back in the day, they were used as wind breaks, and they grow quickly.”
Although State Parks officials are “trying to retain as many as the original trees as possible” because of their historic significance, there are ongoing discussions about whether different tree species should be planted, she said.
The 99-year-old polo field, where Rogers played with friends including Walt Disney and Clark Gable, is still a grassy green oasis. But the announcer’s booth and goalposts burned. So did the equipment used to maintain what is the only outdoor polo field in Los Angeles County, said Felice Densa, manager of the Will Rogers Polo Club, which has about 80 players.
“I am determined to reopen this club, one way or the other,” she said. “We can rebuild the club. And we will. As soon as they start letting us in.”
On a recent Thursday, Jennifer Rogers stepped gingerly across ruins of the ranch house.
Jennifer Rogers looks at the burned remains of the ranch house.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
She pointed out what she recognized: Rusted springs from the bed in Will’s upstairs office that crashed through the ceiling. Yellow tiles from her great-aunt Mary’s bathroom.
“My brother got married right in front of this tree,” she said, pointing to a charred trunk in front of the house. “I’m still in shock — still in shock.”
Three chimneys still stand, and Rogers said there are plans to bring in scaffolding and secure them. The visitor center in Will’s garage has extensive damage but potentially could be rebuilt, she said. And the roughly 150 items rescued from the ranch house are stored in Sacramento.
Rogrers hopes that, eventually, some kind of tribute to her great-grandfather will stand where the house once did.
But, she said, the truth is, “I don’t really know what’s next.”
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